Birth · Book 16 · Preceptor
The deliberate reproduction of the snowstone spell during Vanamin's birth at Spellmonger's Hall in Vanador. The first time Minalan ever made snowstone on purpose. Three goddesses attended -- Briga, Trygg, and Falassa -- and the spell transformed silica within roughly thirty-five hundred feet, quickened Talent in nine thousand residents (humans and four Alon races alike), produced a permanent green outer band of unknown thaumaturgical character, transformed the entire Tal Alon community into a literate self-respecting people, and woke the Magolith into sentience.
The Vanador Snowstone Event is the second known triggering of the snowstone spell, and the first ever performed deliberately by Minalan with the protocol fully understood. It happened during the difficult premature birth of his second son, Vanamin, at Spellmonger's Hall in Vanador. Where the original event at Sevendor had been a frantic accidental theurgy, this one was instrumented, planned, and witnessed by three different goddesses at once. It also happened in a city, with a population of nine thousand inside the field, several non-human races among them, and the Spellmonger's Magolith floating in the bedchamber.
Minalan had spent years trying and failing to reproduce the original spell. The breakthrough was Alya's offhand mention of Sointula, an Avalanti folk-talisman that the most rustic of the Alka Alon kindreds had pressed on her during her first pregnancy. Sointula handled a particular harmonic of vivant energy that Lilastien's medicine and Minalan's thaumaturgy had both overlooked. Once Minalan added that to the protocol, the rest of the calculation closed.
The window was specific. The spell required all of: the exact moment the natal shrouds of mother and child began to separate, a fully-charged Magolith, the witnessing presence of Briga the Bright One, the prayer to her invoked through a flame, the Sointula talisman on the mother, and the Morath Sigil saturated with power. Miss the timing window and the spell would do nothing. Miss any one of the components and it would do the wrong thing.
Minalan instrumented the bedchamber with Tanno Amberil (the high-precision baculus left by the Avalanti adept Stonetrunk), a cabinet of mineral samples for transformation, a suite of meters and detection spells, and three trusted thaumaturges as a working team: Ulin on the monitors, Varen overseeing the field of effect, Taren watching the thaumaturgical inputs. Lilastien presided over the medicine. Pentandra, Astyral, Tyndal, Rondal, Gatina, Jannik, three Tryggite nuns, and a hall full of well-wishers waited downstairs.
Vanamin was three weeks premature. Lilastien drove the labour with more medical control than Sevendor had had: nerve blocks, a magical Alka Alon bedlight, the cohosh-and-lambsfoot tincture exactly when the contractions stalled. Alya wore the Sointula talisman openly. When the medical team called Minalan into the room, his computer Ariel chimed Local Sidereal Time: Thirteen Hours. They were inside the magical window. Minalan invoked Briga at the natal shrine with the rhyming prayer he had learned as a child:
By the Flame that Burneth Bright, we ask for safety through the night. By hearth and torch and taper's light, by forge and oven and poet's rite, the bread to rise and the villain smite, bless us with thy eternal light!
— Minalan, invoking Briga at the Natal Shrine
Briga manifested at once, in the spectral mode visible only to those she chose:
I see you are ready.
— Briga and Minalan, in the bedchamber
Not really, but I'm prepared.
You are doing . . . pretty well, Minalan. For the moment. Try not to screw this up.
The early stages went as Sevendor had: a simple Unbinding had no effect, a more powerful Unbinding had no effect, the protocol called for the Morath Sigil. Minalan poured the full power of the Magolith into the sigil, added the Alka Alon blessing, and as the field saturated he repeated the Briga prayer to call in the Divine pulse the spell required. He felt the spell catch.
Through Tanno Amberil's heightened arcane vision he saw two more shimmerings appear next to Briga. Briga had brought company. Lilastien, attending the birth, had accidentally invoked the Tryggite cohosh-and-lambsfoot prayer when she dosed Alya, summoning Trygg the All-Mother; the third deity, the sea-mother Falassa, came on her own. Three goddesses stood in the bedchamber at the moment of release.
The sigil snapped. A wave of green-tinted magical force exploded outward exactly as it had at Sevendor. Vanamin was delivered. Minalan, every member of his three-thaumaturge team, both nuns, Jannik, and most of the household downstairs lost consciousness. The two Tera Alon in the room were curiously unaffected. Ariel chimed The designated period has now ended.
It worked . . . sort of. Much of my Vanador home was now brilliantly white, or at least streaked with white. So were the streets outside, the other houses, and virtually anything with a molecule of silica in it. But for whatever reason the area that transformed was smaller than the Snowstone Effect in Sevendor. The radius was only about thirty-five hundred feet, not the two miles it had been in Castal.
— Minalan, the morning after
But it had worked. I had made snowstone. On purpose.
The radius of the silica transformation was smaller than at Sevendor — about thirty-five hundred feet rather than two miles — but it transformed a vastly more populated and more varied chunk of geography. Vanador's bedrock was a mixture of limestone and igneous rock with some pure-silica sand pits to the south, so the resulting snowstone came in multiple grades: the sand pits became pure glittering snowsand, while limestone foundations transformed into a paler, more pallid version of the standard substance. The whole of the Overhang above the city went brilliant white.
Beyond the white horizon, the Vanador event produced an effect that Sevendor's had not: a second concentric band, extending another two thousand feet outward, in which the matter took on a permanent dark greenish luster rather than white. No one was able to fully account for the green band, though Minalan suspected the simultaneous attendance of Trygg and Falassa was responsible. It remained a permanent feature of Vanador's outer streets and was studied for years.
Where Sevendor had given them three notable cases — Sire Cei, Lady Dara, Sir Festaran — Vanador gave them more than a hundred. Spellmonger's Hall sat at the centre of a working city of nine thousand, and the field swept the entire built area:
Sevendor had only a few thousand people living there when the Snow That Never Melted came. In Vanador, I had that many in my neighborhood. Our initial estimates put more than nine thousand within range of the snowstone horizon, and the closer you were to the center, the more profoundly you could have been affected.
— Minalan, surveying the aftermath
Pentandra's civic government and Master Thinradel's Arcane Orders staff went into full intake mode at the chapterhouse. Records were kept of every emergent Talent. The first day of the line outside the chapterhouse stretched for blocks. By the time the dust settled, Vanador had at least a hundred new magi who had been mundane the day before.
Some of the cases became famous immediately:
Several of the emergent Talents were tragic. The man whose touch was now lethal killed three neighbours and most of his family by accident, then hanged himself. The Tryggite nun who suddenly knew exactly when and how anyone she met would die drowned herself in a temple pool within two days. An Ishite priestess found herself irresistible and asked to be transferred somewhere with fewer people. A Kasari girl with absolute olfactory perception fled into the wilderness.
The most singular case was Jannik the Rysh, who gained the ability to spawn an exact thoughtform copy of himself — a second Jannik who looked, bled, ate, urinated, and could argue music with the original. Reabsorbing the copy returned its memories to the prime body. None of Minalan's colleagues had ever heard of a sport Talent like it.
Vanador's population was roughly humans, but contained substantial enclaves of four other Alon kindreds, all of whom were within the field. The spell touched each differently:
Where the Sevendor event left circumstantial evidence of Briga's involvement, the Vanador event was witnessed first-hand. Briga manifested in the bedchamber. Lilastien saw her too. So did the second goddess summoned by the cohosh-and-lambsfoot ministration, Trygg the All-Mother, and a third invited by neither Lilastien nor Minalan, Falassa of the Sea. All three pulled their thumb on the working in some way. The conclusion was inescapable: the spell was theurgy as much as thaumaturgy, and snowstone is, in some real sense, the goddess's gift.
The unique green band beyond the white horizon, the unprecedented Tera-Alon cultural fork, the Tal-Alon awakening, and the emergence of the Magolith into sentience are all unaccounted for by the thaumaturgy. They tracked, instead, with which goddesses were in the room and what their domains touched.
The single largest unintended consequence was the awakening of the Magolith. The artefact had been built around the imprint of an ancient creature called the Handmaiden, a sub-creature of the Celestial Mothers; before Vanador it had responded to commands like a sophisticated machine. After the spell it began floating off on its own, seemingly touring the city, at one point hovering above the Temple of Briga.
When Minalan finally summoned it back into the town square, it spoke into his mind for the first time:
Watching.
— the Magolith, Vanador town square
I've always been able to understand you. You are a simple creature.
The Handmaiden had crossed the threshold from imprint to person.
Alya named the boy after the city of his birth and after the project his birth had finally completed:
That's what I named him. For Vanador. And my sweet husband, who finally made snowstone again.
— Lady Alya, on naming Vanamin
The Vanador Snowstone Event made the snowstone spell a repeatable protocol. Within a year Minalan had condensed it to a single symbolic formula filling one notebook of supporting theory. Snowstone went from accidental treasure to manageable tradeable substance. The Vundel snowstone trade resumed on Minalan's terms, the new green band became a focus of years of research, and the hundred or so newly-Talented Vanadori joined the regional Arcane Orders for training.
Most consequentially, the Magolith — now sentient, now known to be the awakened Handmaiden, eventually revealed to be a Celestial Mother — became Minalan's confidant and advisor rather than a tool, and the geometry of the Magelaw shifted with that change.
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